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Ken Salazar is not highly-regarded at the White House or within his own agency; I can't see any way he will survive past December. After taking a lot of well-deserved grief over management issues related to the BP spill, he has since sought to appease his administration critics by cracking down clumsily on the energy industry at every opportunity.

Salazar's Obama-appointed underlings at Interior have been running amok with anti-carbon, anti-property rights, anti-business enthusiasm since his arrival. He once admitted that his agency wanted to put wind and solar on federal lands in roughly the same proportion as he approved gas, oil and coal permits, the effect of which would be almost no exploration at all. Once the Steady Eddie of federal agencies, where career staff (Bureau of Ocean Energy Management notwithstanding) performed a reasonable balancing act between public and private interests on the use of federal lands, Interior has now become as blatantly politicized as EPA.

The big concern over Salazar's departure is who Obama might appoint in his place; e.g., Carol Browner. This administration has no more of an energy policy than did the previous one, but when it does act in a concerted, cross-agency way, its efforts can only be described as sinister and clandestine. For example, it has intentionally failed to complete the Five Year Plan required for approval of future drilling permits, and only seven new permits have been issued in the past year (this compares to 40 or more in a typical year). New permits are important because existing wells run dry after a time; Gulf oil production is now on the decline. While Obama proclaims his desire for energy independence, Salazar and the crazies at Interior have been working in the opposite direction.

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